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Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Give Me a Sign

by Linda Tharp

There’s
a lava rock wall in front of a Maui condo complex from which a nondescript sign
announces the complex’s name, a series of leapfrogging n’s and o’s heralding vacation
before you’ve even dragged your jet-lagged self out of the rental car. The
wall’s rocks are rough and my daughters’ skin, still mainland pale, appeared
delicate in comparison as they stood under the sign for the requisite photo in
their matching sundresses and Salt Water sandals, their hair not yet
chlorine-brassy and their noses not yet peeling.

Nine
years later Mom and Dad invited me back to Maui; they returned every April or
May and always stayed at the complex with that rock wall. My husband endorsed
my joining them, probably hoping time away would have a mellowing effect on me,
and assured me he could handle his job, the house, three kids, and our
Dalmatian for a week. A week! It was too good to be true.

“Are
you sure you don’t mind?” I asked him. “Because you’ll have to get the girls
back and forth to school.”

“Yeah,
I know,” he said. “Don’t worry—I mean, I can
drive.”

I
shook my head. “It’s not just that. Things come up that you never have to deal
with, things you don’t even know
about: permission slips, missing library books... There’s more to it than just
driving.” Then I said, so quietly he asked me to repeat myself, “Besides, what
about Erin?”

“What
about her? I told you, we’ll be fine. Just go have fun.”

I
half-heartedly bought sunscreen and a paperback or two, and agreed—perhaps too
enthusiastically—when others said, “That’s so exciting you get to go!” What
they didn’t know was that a lethal cocktail of melancholy and guilt threatened
to derail my trip before it even started. Worse, I feared my cocktail glass
would be refilled every time I saw the sign hanging on that rock wall and
remembered my girls standing under it.

I’m
not sure how old they were in that photo—probably five, six, and eight. It
seemed as if time stood still then, like I’d be forever unsnarling tangles from
tender scalps and refereeing turns in the front seat, and I remember feeling
comfortably stuck, contentedly itchy with life’s predictability. Now, even
though it had been six years since life morphed from comfortable and
predictable to this, returning to a
spot we’d all enjoyed seemed callous, like I was trying to forget—or
ignore—what has happened. Because today, Erin, our oldest, is in a wheelchair,
nonverbal, and permanently disabled. She will never stand or speak again.

Six
years after that photo was taken—six years after she tied a plastic grass skirt
around her waist and swayed her nonexistent hips, six years after buying her
sisters puka shell necklaces with her allowance—Erin lay in a teaching hospital’s
ICU in a medically-induced coma, her private room so crammed with monitors and
IV pumps and nurses that she seemed inconsequential by comparison. She
eventually survived the tenacious virus that breached the usually unbreachable
blood-brain barrier. Or, that is to say, doctors called her existence survival.

I
expected things to become more complicated as the girls got older, and when
Sarah, our middle daughter, accidentally baked her pet rats Phoebe and Camille
in a misguided attempt to give them a morning of fresh July air (which became
intense heat sooner than Sarah anticipated), I felt a perverse sense of relief
despite my rants about irresponsibility. The complications I anticipated were
along the lines of nefarious boyfriends and speeding tickets; sun-dried rats, I
decided, would provide exemption from future catastrophe.

Often
I wondered if Erin’s doctors were misguided, if their achievements weren’t
necessarily in Erin’s best interest; if her survival—by their fluid
interpretation, anyway—would be enough. In the era of that photo, I believed
Erin’s future held more than the comfortable predictability she was raised
with. The particulars swirled in my imagination like glitter, bits of hope and
promise catching the light but not settling into a discernable pattern. That
pattern took shape in Erin’s early teens, her passion for space exploration
blossoming into dreams of a NASA career, and while she lay fighting for her
life in ICU, a dog-eared NASA application packet with the return address of
“Astronaut Selection Office” lay at home on her bedroom desk—which illustrates
the fluidity of the word “survival.”

We
did our best to maintain an illusion of normalcy during Erin’s eleven-month
hospitalization, but life felt like a series of wrong choices: spending time at
Kelley’s science fair awards instead of at Erin’s bedside, or letting Sarah and
Kelley go to Catalina Island with Mom and Dad for the day despite a nagging
fear that the ferry would sink. I was governed by guilt and doubt, no longer
trusting instinct or common sense. Part of that, I know now, is because life
was upended for no reason other than a willful virus. Nothing seemed safe
anymore, or sacred, or sure. In a matter of hours I had gone from weighing
Erin’s desire for our attendance at her space launch, to listening as a
neurosurgeon recommended sawing away part of Erin’s skull. Now I was afraid
seeing that condo’s sign would unnerve me more than finding those two caged
heatstroke victims in our backyard.

I
was in no hurry to leave our rental car’s backseat despite the five-hour flight
spent seat-belted to a barely cushioned concrete slab, my reluctance having
nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with avoiding that sign for as
long as possible. But as fate would have it we neither hit traffic nor careened
off a cliff so here we were, pulling into the condo’s parking lot, and there it
was, not thirty feet in front of us. Empty, is what I thought—the wall looked
empty without three little girls in front of it. I waited for the smack upside
the head I’d expected, the harsh realization that all three girls would never
stand here—or stand anywhere, for that matter—ever again. The smack never came.

I
spent hours on the same chaise lounges the girls squirmed on as they waited to
go swimming after lunch, Coppertone making them slick as eels, and on the same
beach where they built castles that melted like sugar with the tide. The smack
never came, but a revelation did: even if Erin hadn’t gotten sick, even if our
whole family was here right now, the girls wouldn’t be in matching sundresses,
I wouldn’t pose them for another cheesy picture, and there’d be no more sand
castles. It had nothing to do with Erin’s illness, and everything to do with
the passage of time.

After
Erin got sick I spent countless nights wondering if her survival would be
enough, if blinking and breathing and swallowing would be enough for a girl
with the former determination—and the former smarts—to join NASA. But in my
either/or mind, I’d lumped “survival” and “NASA” together: Erin couldn’t have
one without the other. When those sand castles were washed away, the girls
built new ones, some more elaborate than the original, some less, but they
didn’t stare at their now-vacant lot pining for what was.

The
nonverbal, wheelchair-bound Erin will never join NASA. But the able-bodied Erin
would not have received a standing ovation upon her high school graduation
three years after she was almost declared brain dead, or be named Ambassador of
the Year for her involvement with a nonprofit that provides wheelchairs to the
disabled in Third World Countries ten years after that. The old Erin lived
large, but so does the new Erin—without ever uttering a word.

I’ve
returned to Maui every year since then with Mom and Dad. That rock wall is
still there, but it no longer symbolizes evaporated plans—now it’s simply
jagged stones, possibly thousands of years old, possibly manmade and bought at
Home Depot, stacked like a jigsaw puzzle. And if I look closely, I see tongues
orange from POG juice, fingers sticky with Roselani ice cream, and am reminded
of what’s waiting at home.

Linda Tharp loved language from an early age when
she first realized words can hurt
you, a tactic she employed against neighborhood bullies due to her inability to
throw either sticks or stones very far. She lives in Southern California with
Gary, Erin, and grand-dog Maggie, and is currently writing a memoir based on
the impact of Erin’s illness.